The Replacement Child

by Christine Barber

  “But still a loser?”

  She hesitated again. “I think he’s not a nice person.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She sighed. “He never really thought about her. This one time he wanted her to spend the night at his place, but she had the flu. She wanted to go home. He gave her this long speech about her lack of commitment to their relationship and how she only thought of herself. He even took out this psychology book and read to her something in it about narcissistic people. She was so achy she could hardly move, and she was being selfish?”

  “But he never threatened her? Was he the jealous type?”

  “No. He was too snooty for that. Truthfully, I think he was a white boy who liked having a morenita girlfriend that he could show around to all his white friends.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “He was always saying stuff. Like whenever he had to repeat something to Melissa if she didn’t hear him, he’d say, ‘Maybe I should say it in Spanish so you’d understand.’ He was just being condescending. He knew she didn’t speak Spanish.”

  Gil nodded. Melissa was like many Hispanics native to Northern New Mexico: of Hispanic descent but not Spanish-speaking. Most of Gil’s family didn’t know Spanish, either. The Judge had made sure that Gil learned it.

  Judy Maes was wiping tears from her eyes with her fingertips.

  “Let’s get back to the drugs,” he said. “Did you ever see her do any? Pot? Anything?”

  “Are you insane? She would have died first.” Realizing what she had just said, Judy covered her eyes.

  “Can you think of any reason why she might have had drugs in her car?”

  “She wouldn’t even know how to buy drugs. That person who wrote that story in the paper should be shot.” Her voice turned cold. “Melissa wasn’t a tecata. She wasn’t an addict. She hardly drank caffeine. I smoked a joint once in college and she bought me books on the dangers of pot. She wanted me to go with her to some Narcotics Anonymous meeting. All this for taking just one hit off a joint. She said drugs were the devil.”

  Gil wondered what could possibly have happened to make Melissa give in to the devil. Going from no drugs to injecting heroin in just a few months was a long, hard fall. Who or what had given her that push?

  Lucy watched the Santa Fe County deputies secure the dead woman’s home. The first officer on scene had instructed her and Gerald not to leave. Not that she would have. They sat in the ambulance, waiting.

  She had no way of knowing whether the dead woman was Scanner Lady. She had never seen Scanner Lady, never known her name, never known where she lived. All Lucy knew was her voice.

  “Gerald, how many old ladies in Santa Fe do you think listen to police scanners? A few, right? At least more than one? Maybe more like six? With a population of a hundred thousand between the city and the county, maybe more like ten or twenty. How unusual is it? It can’t be that weird a hobby.”

  She knew she was rambling. She had been for the past ten minutes. Gerald sat quietly, listening to her, not commenting. She had told him everything—about Scanner Lady’s call, about talking to Detective Montoya.

  She kept talking. “This is just a coincidence. Maybe the dead woman ran a meth lab in her guest bedroom and that’s why she had a police scanner. Who knows? Just because a woman who owns a scanner gets killed right after I look into a phone call from a woman who owns a scanner doesn’t mean the two incidents are related.” She winced at her words—not only was she rambling, she wasn’t making any sense.

  Lucy slouched in her seat. She was just seeing a conspiracy here that didn’t exist. Journalists loved conspiracy theories because in their line of work, sometimes the conspiracy theories turned out to be true. “It’s not Scanner Lady. It can’t be her,” she muttered.

  She jumped as a deputy knocked on the ambulance window. She and Gerald were escorted into the house. Deputies and fingerprint dust were everywhere. The police photographer clicked away. They were led into the back bedroom.

  A big man with a round chest introduced himself as Major Ed Garcia, the investigating officer. Gerald greeted him warmly, calling him Eddie and giving him a handshake/hug. Lucy wondered how they knew each other. Cousins? Uncles?

  Gerald explained how he and Lucy had come to the house and found the body. It was a quick summary, taking only a few sentences. Garcia nodded and didn’t ask any questions. It was all routine. They gave Garcia their names, addresses, and phone numbers. A deputy was about to escort them out when Lucy said, “Actually, Major, I was wondering about something.” She felt Gerald shift his stance next to her. He probably wanted her to shut up, but she didn’t care. She needed to know.

  “I work at the newspaper, and we have this woman who always calls in with tips she hears on her scanner. I was just thinking that maybe this woman might be our tipster.”

  Garcia looked at her intently. “You work at the newspaper? What do you do there?”

  Lucy heard the edge in his voice. The innate distrust of journalists. “I’m an editor.”

  Garcia glanced accusingly at Gerald, then back at Lucy. She could tell that the major was getting nervous. He didn’t say anything.

  She made herself smile brightly. “If I could just hear her voice, maybe just hear her answering-machine message, I would know if she’s our tipster and let you guys get back to work.”

  Garcia wasn’t buying her Pollyanna act. “I’m going to have to check with my superiors,” he said.

  “I just need to hear her voice, that’s all. I just need to be sure. I only need to listen to the answering machine. How could that hurt anything? I swear I’m not going to run out and tell the newspaper anything.”

  “Like I said, I need to check with my bosses. I have your name and number. I’ll call you.”

  Lucy was about to argue but Gerald grabbed her arm and steered her out of the room. Damn police. Because she worked at a newspaper she was automatically labeled untrustworthy and willing to do anything to get a story.

  As she walked through the living room, Lucy glanced furtively at the answering machine. It had been dusted for prints. If only she had listened to it before the cops showed up. But she had been trying to preserve the scene.

  As they walked out into the bright sunlight, the OMI van pulled up. Lucy looked at the deputy escorting them.

  “Deputy, what’s the operating theory? What do you guys think happened?” Lucy asked.

  “Robbery that got interrupted,” he answered with no intonation.

  “A robbery? Was anything taken? There were no signs of a struggle. The strangulation marks were made by a rope or something. If she had surprised a robber he would have reacted quickly and used his hands, right?”

  The deputy shrugged. “Who knows?”

  “The dead woman—what was her name?” Lucy asked.

  The deputy hesitated. He had seen the exchange between her and Garcia.

  “How can it hurt to tell me her name? I have to know so I can write my report anyway. If I don’t find out from you, I’ll just call dispatch for it,” Lucy asked.

  The deputy hesitated again before he said quietly, “Patsy Burke.”

  How could God allow a man that stupid to live? Someone should have killed Garcia with a rock a long time ago,” Lucy said as they climbed back into the ambulance. It took her a second to remember the half hug that Gerald had given Garcia. “Oh, sorry. I forgot you guys are related.”

  “We’re not related. We played football together in high school, although we might be second cousins on my mother’s side.” Gerald smiled a little. “He’s not a bad guy.”

  “You could have fooled me.”

  Gerald shook his head and said, “He’s just doing his job.”

  “Well, if his job is to be a jerk, he’s great at it.”

  “In his mind, you’re the enemy. The newspaper has it out for the police.”

  “No, we don’t, and I wasn’t there as a member of the media, I was there as a stupid medic.” She winced as
she realized what she had just said. “Sorry, Gerald. I take back the ‘stupid’ part.”

  Gerald didn’t answer as he turned onto the highway.

  Lucy picked up her cell phone and dialed 411.

  “What are you doing?” Gerald asked.

  “I’m going to get Patsy Burke’s phone number. I want to listen to her answering-machine message.”

  “That’s not going to get you anywhere. The cops will just pick the phone up.”

  “I’ll hang up.”

  “Ever hear of star-69?”

  “Does that work on cell phones?”

  “Do you really want to find out?”

  “Goddammit,” Lucy said as she slapped her phone shut. She tapped her knee against the door. “Gerald, turn around,” she said suddenly.

  “What for?” he asked without slowing down.

  “I can talk to the friend, that neighbor lady, the one who called us. I bet she knows if Patsy Burke was Scanner Lady.”

  “It’s no good,” Gerald said. “They had her inside in one of the bedrooms. Didn’t you see her?”

  Lucy hadn’t seen anything in the house; she had been so focused on Garcia and the answering machine.

  She looked out at the highway, watching the Burger Kings, Albertsons, and Jiffy Lubes go by. She stared at the brown van driving in front of them. The make of the van was indeterminate; it was just old. On the back window was written KLASSY VAN in silver letters, because nothing says classy like using a K to misspell a word. As they passed the van, she looked at the driver, who was busily gesturing into his cell phone.

  “Gerald,” she said without looking at him, “what do you do if you think you got someone killed?”

  Gil was on his way to check on Maxine Baca when he got a page. As the dispatcher put it, “There’s a woman at the office who is anxious to see you.” What the dispatcher meant was that the woman was being difficult.

  As he pulled into the parking lot he saw the editor from the newspaper leaning against a gray Toyota Camry. What was her name again? Something Newroe. Where had he put her business card?

  “Ms. Newroe, how can I help you?”

  She took a deep breath, and Gil wondered if it was to calm herself or for courage.

  “Detective, I need to talk to you.” She ran a hand through her dark blond hair. “It’s connected to what we talked about yesterday, but now it’s of a personal nature, not a professional one, so I’m not here as a journalist but as a … Oh hell, I don’t know what I’m here as. God, I’m not making any sense.” She smiled, laughing at herself.

  Gil realized that she was nervous. “We can go inside….”

  “No, no, please, let’s stay out here.” The suggestion had upset her.

  “Okay. Well, there’s a bench over there.” They sat down near some bushes.

  She breathed deeply again before starting. “I know this whole thing is going to sound odd, but please bear with me.” She looked at him, and he nodded. He stopped himself from saying anything more. He wanted to comfort her and calm her down.

  She continued. “So, okay, besides being an editor at the paper I’m sort of a volunteer medic with the county, over at Piñon—just so you know that. Just a few hours ago, we get a page out to this house where we find this dead lady named Patsy Burke. We call the sheriff and everything and they say she’s been murdered.” She stopped, inhaling again. “Here’s the weird part that you’re going to think I’m a freak for even considering: she had a scanner turned on in her house.”

  Gil watched her watch him. She seemed to have calmed down now that she was telling the story.

  She continued without waiting for him to comment. “I know this whole thing is a long shot, but what if she is Scanner Lady? That tipster I told you about? I mean, it could be. The only way for me to know for sure is to hear her voice, but the deputies wouldn’t let me. I just wanted to hear her voice on the answering machine, to rule out the possibility it’s her, you know?”

  “You explained all this to the deputies?” Gil asked. She nodded. “And they wouldn’t let you listen to the answering machine?” She shook her head.

  “Who’s in charge of the investigation?” he asked.

  “Major Garcia,” she said, with a hint of bitterness. He knew Garcia. He was a good investigator.

  “What does he think happened?”

  “A botched burglary.”

  “Ms. Newroe, it seems you should be talking to the sheriff’s office, not with me.”

  “I know. I’ve tried. But they’re being uncooperative.” She emphasized the last word. “They said they’d call me, but in the meantime, the next step is to assume it’s Scanner Lady. I know I’m jumping the gun a bit, but without evidence to the contrary, you stick with the illogical—isn’t that what Sherlock Holmes always said?”

  “Okay. We’ll assume for the moment it was Scanner Lady,” Gil said. “How can I help you?”

  She got up from the bench and paced back and forth twice before answering. He could tell that she was trying to choose her words. She was nervous again.

  “Well, here goes: if it is really Scanner Lady, she might have been killed because of what she heard on her scanner Monday night. What she told me about. The only two people in my office who knew she told me anything were myself and my reporter. I checked with him—he didn’t tell anyone. The only person I told was you, in a room full of cops. So …”

  “Wait a second. Assuming that you don’t think I killed her, are you saying you think someone in the police station overheard our conversation and killed her?”

  She didn’t answer and kept pacing, not looking at him, like his daughter Therese did when she was telling a lie.

  “Ms. Newroe, there are so many things wrong with that assumption, I don’t even know where to begin. She could have been killed in a burglary, like Major Garcia said. The deputies know what they’re doing. Or she could have been killed for some other reason that has nothing to do with you. That would make the most sense. And even if she was killed because of what she told you—”

  Lucy interrupted him. “Believe me I know, I know. I’ve been through this in my head. It might not even be her, for chrissakes. But it all comes back to this for me—what Scanner Lady told me involved a crime some cop committed. I talked about it in a room full of cops. The next day she’s dead. I think it would be illogical of me to think that the two things aren’t connected.” She was more defensive now.

  “Ms. Newroe, even if all that were true, the main problem is that in our conversation yesterday, you never even said her name. You told me you didn’t even know her name. How could one of my police officers have killed her if he didn’t know who she was?”

  “I know. I know. None of this makes any sense.” Her voice sounded like she was crying, but there were no tears. “But don’t you get it? I’ve got to know if my big mouth and her getting killed are connected. If there’s even a remote chance that I got her killed, I have to know.”

  “Ms. Newroe, I really don’t see—”

  She must have heard the finality in his voice, so she interrupted him. “Listen, Detective Montoya. Scanner Lady said she heard two Santa Fe police officers discussing a dead body. Maybe they were talking about Melissa Baca’s since that’s the only dead body we have around currently. Doesn’t it interest you that there’s the slightest of possibilities that whoever killed Melissa Baca may have killed Patsy Burke?”

  He didn’t answer her because he didn’t know what to say.

  She stopped pacing and stood so still that Gil wondered if she was holding her breath. She turned to him quickly. “What about the conversation between the cops over the scanner? That has to be on tape at the dispatch center, right?” The 911 dispatch center automatically recorded all conversations on the police-radio frequencies.

  Gil shook his head. “I checked on that last night. I listened to the dispatch tapes from that night myself. There was nothing.” Even though he hadn’t really known what he was looking for, he had spent twenty minu
tes checking the tapes.

  “How can that be? Maybe someone erased them. You guys have had that problem before.”

  Four years earlier, two police officers had made the mistake of discussing over the radio how they looked at porn on the Internet while at work. When the investigators went to find the tape of that conversation, it had been “accidentally” erased by one of the dispatchers. The police officers and the dispatcher had been fired.

  “I thought of that, so I asked the dispatcher working that night if she had heard anything. She hadn’t. And I believe her. There is no evidence of that call.” He said the next part gently: “Maybe your Scanner Lady made the whole conversation up. Maybe she’s a lonely old woman who wants a little attention.”

  She looked him in the eye. “Thank you for your time, Detective. I’m sorry if I seemed upset. It has been a difficult day.”

  She turned and walked quickly away. Gil watched her get into her car and leave. He felt like he had just lost an argument with his wife.

  Lucy left the police station and drove straight back to Scanner Lady’s house. The yellow crime-scene tape fought against the wind. The deputy posted at the front door looked bored as he talked on his cell phone. Lucy parked down the street and walked to the house next door to Scanner Lady’s. She knocked and an old face peered out the front door.

  “Hi. You’re Claire Schoen, right?” Lucy asked. She had called the newspaper and gotten one of the interns to look up Mrs. Schoen’s name in the cross directory, where all you needed was the address or phone number and got the resident’s name. “My name’s Lucy Newroe. I was one of the medics who came to help your friend Mrs. Burke.” Lucy felt her name being chiseled on some gravestone in hell. An hour ago she’d been ready to tell Gerald that she was quitting the fire department, and now she was using it to con an old lady.

  “Oh, yes,” Claire Schoen murmured as she opened the door wider, letting Lucy into a living room designed in Southwestern Tourist Shop—pink, howling coyote bookends and a kiva. Lucy counted seven chile ristras hanging from the ceiling. A fake Navajo rug on the wall clashed with the geometric designs on the couch. Lucy thought the color of the brown carpet probably was called cinnamon mesa or chocolate petroglyph.